Editorial Team

Space Daily Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Space Daily Editorial Team produces content across our two editorial pillars: space industry news and Mind & Meaning. We cover launches, missions, satellites, defense, and the technology of getting humans to space, alongside the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Space Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Military Space

There is a single satellite launched by the US Navy in 1964 that is still in orbit, still transmitting, and still being used by amateur radio operators around the world — and nobody at the Navy has been in charge of it for decades

On December 28, 1964, a Thor-Able-Star rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and put a small US Navy satellite into a low polar orbit.

May 20, 2026

Constellations

The Senate just installed a deputy administrator who thinks NASA’s job is beating China to the moon — and the 46-43 vote tells you everything about what the agency is becoming

Matt Anderson, the retired Air Force colonel who told senators that beating China to the moon should be NASA's top priority, was confirmed Monday as the…

May 20, 2026

Cosmology

Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit while his identical twin brother stayed on Earth, and when he came home NASA discovered his gene expression had changed in ways that didn’t fully reverse

The conventional story about Scott Kelly's year in space is that he came back taller, weaker, and a few milliseconds younger than his identical twin Mark.

May 20, 2026

Science

Octopuses have nine brains, three hearts, and blue copper-based blood, with roughly two-thirds of their neurons spread through their arms, allowing each arm to taste, move, and react with a startling degree of local control

An octopus reaching into a crevice is not simply moving a limb the way a human moves a hand.

May 20, 2026

Cosmology

The bacteria living in and on your body outnumber your own cells, which means that by strict cellular count you are not majority human — and the ratio shifts noticeably depending on whether you’ve just been to the bathroom

It feels strange to admit, but the body reading this sentence is not, by strict cellular count, a human body.

May 20, 2026

Constellations

In April 2019 the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the lunar surface carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades inside a “lunar library” — and later impact tests put the survival cutoff for tardigrades at around 900 metres per second, almost exactly Beresheet’s crash speed, meaning we still don’t know whether Earth life is now lying dormant on the Moon with no water to revive it.

In April 2019, the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the lunar surface carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades inside a "lunar library". Later…

May 20, 2026

Psychology

Radioactive iron from an ancient stellar explosion has been found in 80,000-year-old Antarctic ice, confirming that the Solar System is passing through the remnant debris of a supernova

A team led by researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has found traces of iron-60 in Antarctic ice cores dating back between 40,000 and…

May 20, 2026

Human Behaviour

Technology spent 15 years removing every small resistance from your day — and a growing body of research suggests that was not as good for your brain as it was for their engagement metrics

Over roughly the past decade and a half, the dominant design logic of consumer technology has been to remove friction.

May 20, 2026

Science

In 2007 the European Space Agency exposed dried tardigrades to the open vacuum of space for 10 days aboard the FOTON-M3 mission, and most survived the combination of vacuum and cosmic radiation, with some even surviving direct solar UV — then revived back on Earth and produced viable offspring.

In September 2007, the European Space Agency exposed dried tardigrades to the open vacuum of space for 10 days aboard the FOTON-M3 mission.

May 20, 2026

Cosmology

Japan sits on the intersection of four tectonic plates and experiences roughly 1,500 earthquakes a year, which is why the country’s building codes are the strictest on Earth — and why the Tokyo Skytree, the second-tallest structure in the world, is designed to sway rather than resist

The Tokyo Skytree is designed to move during earthquakes — not resist them. The 634-meter broadcasting tower that opened in 2012 in Sumida City is, by most…

May 20, 2026

Science

The Antikythera mechanism was recovered from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901 with at least 30 hand-cut bronze gears inside, and no comparable machine survives for centuries after it, as if a whole engineering tradition dropped out of history

The Antikythera mechanism sits in a climate-controlled case at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens: a shoebox-sized mass of corroded bronze, wood, inscriptions, and gearwork that should not look as modern as it does.

May 19, 2026

Cosmology

China’s Chang’e 5 mission returned lunar rocks dated to 2 billion years old — 800 million years younger than anything Apollo brought back — which means the Moon was geologically active hundreds of millions of years later than every textbook had assumed, and most of those textbooks haven’t been updated yet

On December 17, 2020, a small Chinese spacecraft called Chang'e 5 landed in the Pacific Ocean carrying approximately 1.731 kilograms of lunar material.

May 19, 2026

Science

About 60 percent of the human body’s mass is water, but a much more interesting figure is that roughly half of the cells in our bodies aren’t human at all — they’re bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms whose collective genetic material vastly outnumbers our own, and emerging research suggests they’re influencing mood, sleep, and certain kinds of decision-making in ways we’re only beginning to map.

The standard cultural framing of the human body tends to treat it as a self-contained biological unit composed of cells that are, in some structural sense, all human.

May 19, 2026

Science

The Mariana Trench, the deepest known point on Earth’s surface, sits about 36,000 feet below sea level — and yet there are living organisms thriving down there, including small white shrimp-like amphipods that have been found with traces of plastic in their digestive systems, in a habitat that almost no human has ever physically reached

The Mariana Trench is, by every available measurement, the deepest point on the surface of the Earth.

May 19, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Psychology explains why nearly all intelligent people change their minds in front of others more often than the rest of us are willing to — and the reason isn’t that they care less about being right, it’s that they’ve stopped needing to look right while they’re working out what’s true

There is a particular small behavior that, on close observation, distinguishes the most intelligent people in any given room from the rest of the participants.

May 19, 2026

Psychology

Cognitive scientists have a name for the experience of suddenly realizing you’ve been reading a book for several minutes without absorbing any of the words — “mind-wandering” — and recent research suggests humans spend roughly 47 percent of waking life in some version of this state, which means the default condition of consciousness is mostly somewhere other than the present

In 2010, two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, published a study in the journal Science that has, in the decade and a half since…

May 19, 2026